Every body either loves or hates them I am an oddity the lab I manage has many macs (19 pros) I personally own an old I book and a mac pro tower. (the tower of power!) I work with a number of mac book pros I have not heard of a problem of the new ones the return of the firewire port is a boon. What were they thinking when they removed it??! The thing with apple is everything is done for you. It just works out of the box and if you just want it to work it does. The maintenance is super simple repair the permissions every once in a while and make sure the cron tasks are done periodically. There are GNU apps that do them for you or just leave it on and not sleeping over night. If you get into tinkering the system beats with a unix heart and command lines can change a ton of things if you want. If you don't it just works.

The PCs we have, I spend a lot of time messing with to keep them tuned and working all the time it is about ten hours to one 'fixing' pc to mac. The big question is it a tool? Macs are working tools they play games but the titles are limited and slow to be released. If you want a toy buy a PC. If you just want a communication tool, graphics tool, and something that just is friendly to work with get a mac.